RV Life on the Road and Breaking Down

09/30/16

Living and traveling full-time in your RV is great! – Except, when it isn’t! : ( With all vehicles you have the risk of mechanical failure. When you are traveling full-time, the percentage is greater.

#1 – When hitching up and preparing to leave Bishop, CA this morning, we noticed a large oil leak under our truck. Not a teeny-tiny drip, but more like a small flow.

We called all around Bishop to make an appointment with a mechanic shop. Every shop was busy until at least the middle of the week. This was a Friday morning and there was a car show in town, so there weren’t any available RV spaces anywhere. We finally talked one place into just looking at the truck for us to see how bad the leak was and if the leak was too bad for us to get to Minden which is 156 miles from Bishop.

Two mechanics looked the truck over and said that we should be able to get to Minden, and that we should have extra oil available with us, to keep stopping and checking the oil level, and to keep an eye on the gauges.

We stopped twice and checked the oil level and the levels were good both times. Whew! Almost home!

#2 – Just as we were only about 20 miles from our destination, heading up a hill…

Psshhh! Steam was coming up from the hood. Tom did his best to pull over to a safe place on the side of the road. We had a small shoulder to pull over on to, but we were still RIGHT on a busy highway. We jumped out of the truck quickly to make sure that there wasn’t a fire under the hood! Nope, (thank goodness) just a lot of steam with water and coolant spraying everywhere.

At first, we thought that the hose to the radiator had just come off, but the part of the radiator that the hose connects to actually broke right where it was clamped on.

We called Coach-Net and they got a mechanic out to us. We only waited a little less than an hour from when the Coach-Net agent said that the mechanic would be on their way within an hour. Not bad!**

The mechanic, Willy was great! He was jovial, and that helps a lot when you are broke down on the side of the road.

He connected the hose back to the radiator onto the small section of the radiator that was still intact, a “band-aid” just to get us home. We were still going to need a new radiator.

Thankfully, we had water in our fresh water tank, so we were able to refill the radiator!* Willy poured a couple gallons or so into the reservoir and we thought we were good to go. He said that he would follow  us in to town to make sure we would be able to get home. We got about 1/4 mile up the road and the temperature gauge immediately went to the red, so we pulled over.

Apparently, we had lost a LOT of water when the hose came off because it looked as though we hadn’t put any liquid in at all. We went back into the fifth wheel and got more water. * This time, we got all the way to town and we stopped in a big parking lot to settle up with Willy. We were able to get home.

*This is another good reason to always travel with water in your fresh water tank.

**Our Coach-Net Experience

We were pleased with the agent that we spoke to on the phone. She was very nice and helpful. Her first concern was our safety, asking us if we were off the road in a safe place and did we need the police to direct traffic. We were on the side of the road safely and didn’t need the police. We waited maybe about 20 minutes for her to call us back with two choices of mobile mechanics. It took just under an hour for the mechanic to come to us.

Here’s the “however” – when we went to pay Willy for his labor, he said that he’s had problems in the past with receiving his payment from Coach-Net and that he almost turned down the call. We paid him the full amount and we are working on settling up with Coach-Net for reimbursement of the mobile fee.

Also, we asked the agent on the phone about what would happen if we still needed a tow after the mechanic came and wasn’t able to repair the truck, we were told that we were only allowed one service per “issue” – so, we would have to pay for the tow out-of-pocket if we needed it!

In addition, if they just came and towed us – which would have to be both the truck and the fifth wheel in our case, they would have to take us to an authorized dealer which would have been WAY out of our way, and we LIVE in our fifth wheel, so that would have been complicated.

We didn’t think it was right that we couldn’t get towed with the plan we have, so Tom checked on it and if the mechanic had not been able to fix the problem enough for us to drive, we would have been able to get a tow. We still would have been towed to a dealer though and not home.

So, for our overall review of Coach-Net… we’ll let ya know what happens with the reimbursement.